This is your resource for exploring various topics in glass: delve deeper with this collection of articles, multimedia, and virtual books all about glass. Content is frequently added to the area, so check back for new items. If you have a topic you'd like to see covered, send us your suggestion. If you have a specific question, Ask a Glass Question at our Rakow Research Library.

Arguably the most beautiful medieval glass vessel to survive, this goblet is also original. It is probably the invention of one glassblower who took the secret of its manufacture to his grave. See this extraordinarily elegant process, not rediscovered until the 20th century.

This was the common method of making small glass vessels from around 1500 BC until the discovery of glassblowing. Dung, clay, and glass came together in a seemingly odd process that was indispensable for more than a millennium and a half.

A Collaboration of The Corning Museum of Glass + Vitra Design Museum. GlassLab brings the ancient processes and skills of glassmaking together with creative and innovative minds in the design world. Contemporary designers, working with Corning Museum of Glass glassmakers in a unique mobile hot

Artists have proven that glass as a medium for sculpture is virtually without limits. Among hot-working processes, flameworking allows the greatest detail and the smallest scale. Surprisingly though, it can also be used to create sculpture large enough to fill rooms.

Encasing glass decorations and small-scale sculpture within a mass of molten colorless glass to make paperweights began in the 1840s. It continues to be practiced by a limited number of specialized glass artists.

By about AD 20, Roman workers had discovered that a bubble of molten glass could be lowered into a mold and then further inflated to fill the mold. In this way, the full-size vessel, complete with elaborate decoration, was made almost instantly.

Hot-working processes used to form a glass object—glassblowing for example—must be followed by a very gradual cooling period called annealing. See what happens when an object is not properly annealed and learn why it breaks.

Alternately using different colored glasses, plunged into different shaped dip molds, to build up a variety of layers, a stout cane is drawn. When the cane is cut, the pattern is revealed at the cross-section.

This video shows the technique of making a kuttrolf, an object in the exhibition Medieval Glass for Popes, Princes, and Peasants, on view at The Corning Museum of Glass from May 15, 2010, to January 2, 2011.

GlassLab is a program from The Corning Museum of Glass that introduces designers to glass as a means to immediately prototype designs in front of a live audience. During Art Basel in June, 2011, GlassLab presented at the Vitra Design Museum. Designer Paul Cocksedge designed an interactive glass

This video shows the technique of making a medieval goblet, an object in the exhibition Medieval Glass for Popes, Princes, and Peasants, on view at The Corning Museum of Glass May 15, 2010, to January 2, 2011.

Some of the first glassblowers working in Italy—perhaps as early as 30 BC—made blanks for craftspeople accustomed to decorating hardstone objects. The glassblowing process required two contrasting glasses, usually blue and white.

Benjamin Franklin invented this strange musical instrument. It was popular in the late 18th century. Sounds were made by running moistened fingers along the rims of the glasses. Some people were afraid that this strange music would drive them crazy.

Sigi Moeslinger at GlassLab at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, May 17-June 3, 2008. A program of The Corning Museum of Glass, GlassLab brings designers together with glassmakers to offer them rare access to experimenting with hot glass and prototyping their design concepts.

Listen as curator Dedo von Kerssenbrock-Krosigk describes this tazza with Medici Arms. This tazza is enameled with the coat of arms of the Medici family combined with crossed keys and a papal tiara, suggesting that they were made for a member of the church, most probably either Pope Leo X or Pope

Cage cups were made by Roman glasscutters in the fourth century AD. The entire vessel was cut from a thick-walled glass hemisphere. The metal attachments show that the object was a hanging lamp. Imagine the shadows the "cage" would have cast as the lamplight flickered.

Listen as curator Tina Oldknow describes Anthem of Joy in Glass by glass artist Věra Lišková. Lišková was a talented designer who pioneered the use of borosilicate glass for sculpture. Traditionally, borosilicate glass is used for making laboratory wares for scientists, such as beakers and test

Listen as curator Dedo von Kerssenbrock-Krosigk describes the glass table and boat by the Cristalleries de Baccarat. At the 1900 World's Fair in Paris, the Parisian department store Le Grand Dépôt displayed a sculpture in the form of a boat. It was designed by Charles Vital Cornu (1851--1927),

Cage cups were made by Roman glasscutters in the fourth century AD. The entire vessel was cut from a thick-walled glass hemisphere. The metal attachments show that the object was a hanging lamp. Imagine the shadows the "cage" would have cast as the lamplight flickered.

Listen as glass artist William Gudenrath, describes the techniques used to create Endeavor by Italian artist Lino Tagliapietra. A sense of weightlessness characterizes this installation of 18 boat-like forms. Inspired by the sight of the many gondolas that gather at the entrance to the Venetian